Mooching around the not-there-no-more Smallfish Records on Old Street sometime in 2000 I picked up an album sleeve that caught my eye; whether it was the eye on the sleeve that caught my eye is irrelevant but when you..re in a record shop almost anything can trigger a buying frenzy, especially when you..ve almost given up on ever hearing anything unusual or stimulating again. That album was ..Circle.. by Doseone and Boom Bip and it, forgive me, blew my mind. Hackneyed though that phrase may be it illuminates perfectly the impact that it had. I had to take it round to a mate..s house just to make sure I was hearing it right. The sheer otherworldliness of the sound, the eerie beatscapes and alien vocals, intangible street corner conversations, and that distinctive whine; phew, I..ve never listened to Eminem since.

..For Hero : For Fool.. flies out of the speakers and in its relentless creativity and energy, it never stops. It..s like running through Futurama while people, aliens, radios and televisions scream at you. It..s a multilayered sensory overload. Beautifully paced, it changes gears with an artful ease and it..s so slick but slick in a good, tight, style, combining Talking Heads funk, soaring harmonies and some frankly astonishing vocal athletics. If you take your ear off it for a few seconds, you really have no idea if the track has changed such is the lack of structure (this is one of the hardest records I..ve ever had to write about because I find that I want to contradict myself every idea I have. It is tight but it..s so loose. It does have a lack of structure but within the individual parts, it..s incredibly detailed and thought out).

I had to get my microscope over the grooves for a better look at the textures and minutiae present; it was still too intricate for me to pierce its fibrous heart and this is no crappy student ..scope either; it..s a Brunel SP500 Infinity and that..s serious zoom la. This is what I always thought that 21st Century Pop Music should sound like, there..s no tokenism, no cross cultural clumsiness. It..s an organic, evolved and highly intelligent record. ..Return of the Vein.. nearly brought tears to my eyes; not the result of any sappy emoting on their part but by the intensity of its razor sharp consummation; shot to pieces by the bullets of its brilliance. If the choruses were placed more conventionally, the arrangements framed within standard popular music formula this album could be a danger to the pleasure senses but I guess taking that line detracts from its individualistic merits.

Part two of a trilogy; ..For Hero : For Fool.. tails the protagonist, Hour Hero Yes, as he ventures out of the bedroom and into the light, noise and confusion of the outside world. This explains the vastness of sound, the bright white shock of the fountainhead. The album opens with Hour Hero onstage, .."everything is empty and runneth over"... cuts clean across your clenched teeth.., and within two songs he..s found himself in a ..serious serious guts competition (sponsored in part by the pain reliever people and the heads of music television).. where rappers disembowel themselves and compare the lengths of their intestines, celebrity judges include ..Charles Bronson..s angry and gay only daughter.. and ..Ice Cube back from when he was hard... Adam ..Doseone.. Druckler is a poet as well as a musician and artist and the song lyrics aren..t confined to clever titles and sketchy details, his descriptions of events are rich and meticulous ..every so often...in the name of health, an executioner capped usher struts about the gut covered table misting everyone's exposed and heaving organs with a modified and fancy water pistol all in the name of health... Now that..s funny. Y..know, we do have a choice here, we can snork along to Robbie Williams ..rapping.. about the Special Olympics or we can put the effort in for greater reward.

The single, ..The Mercury Craze.., begins like ..Jailhouse Rock....

Hang on..

That can..t be right, lemme check..

It does! Like Gnarles Barkely duetting with Cameo, Hour Hero discovers he has unique blood, prompting the question that has perplexed great minds for centuries

..what would you give in order to get
your hands on the utmost in luxury blood...
only to have yours flushed out completely
and replaced with that of a nice bright white,
college boy or very viral multi-millionaire widow.....

Of course, one has to think about the commercial benefits, this is the world that we have created; ..can't you hear your mercury just ringing with the jingles already.....
The album closes, appropriately, with ..The Ends... An existential ponder through life and its meaning, or rather its distinct lack thereof. It displays remarkable vision and a firm, assured grip on the word and the sound; ..is there no sort of luck involved in not being born an ant or elephant... or is this just, pure and unadulterated math, water willed, and egg improvised, until hatched by knife light then..... We lose Hour Hero at the last, wading through primeval soups of waist high gunk and fog, ears straining at imperceptible organs, scything the heads from swaying spacereeds as they appear through the mists of the galaxy asking himself ..is there a simple universal system of buoy and rope, that you would use to tug your weightless mass along on, 'til you found a planet that you felt might be just right for you...

Intelligent, melodic, poetic and funny, so this is what Now sounds like eh?

I was beginning to wonder.